School of Music

Professor Kenneth Hamilton

Overview

Image credit: Richard Walton

Position:Acting Head of School
Professor of Music
Dean (International), College of Arts, Humanities and Social SciencesEmail:HamiltonK1@cardiff.ac.ukTelephone:+44(0)29
208 74380Fax:+44(0)29
208 74379Extension:74380Location:

Described as “an outstanding virtuoso- one of the finest players of his generation” by Moscow’s Kommersant Daily; as a performer “full of energy and wit” by the New York Times; and by the Singapore Straits Times as “a formidable virtuoso”, Scottish pianist and scholar Kenneth Hamilton concertises worldwide as a soloist on both modern and historical instruments. His publications have also had an international impact, with his much discussed most recent book, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (OUP), welcomed as “full of wit and interest, and written with passion” by Charles Rosen (Times Literary Supplement) and as “a wonderful book” by James Fenton (The Guardian).

An enthusiastic advocate of the value of musical scholarship both for performers and their audiences, Professor Hamilton is a committed public communicator who believes that the appreciation of music in its historical context can vitally enhance its meaning. And the more we understand, the more we can be moved. He himself has never entirely lost his fascination for the multifarious history of piano performance, nor for the works of Wagner, Chopin and Liszt, among others.

He has broadcast frequently as pianist, presenter or panellist on television and radio, most recently as soloist in a performance of Chopin’s first piano concerto with the Istanbul Chamber Orchestra for Turkish Television, as presenter of “Mendelssohn in Scotland” for Deutsche Welle Channel (where he was overshadowed in every sense by the Scottish scenery) and as interviewee for CBC (Canada), ABC (Australia) and New York Public Radio. He is also a familiar voice on BBC Radios 3 and 4, and the World Service.

As a pianist, he has numerous international engagements to his credit, including a memorable recreation of Liszt’s 1847 concerts in Constantinople for the Istanbul International Festival, performances of works by Chopin on historical and modern pianos at the Cité de la Musique, Paris, participation as a soloist in the Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms Unwrapped Festivals at London’s Kings Place, appearances at the Southbank, at festivals in Korea, in numerous venues in the US, and annual recitals at the Singapore Esplanade.

As a writer, Professor Hamilton has published widely in the academic and popular press, the latter including a bicentenary article on Liszt for TheNew York Times. He does not regard academic and popular readerships as necessarily distinct, believing that the “cultured general reader” is an audience well worth cultivating, and that scholarship is of distinctly limited value if it caters only to other scholars.

His monograph After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (Oxford University Press, 2008) became a Classical music bestseller soon after its publication, and attracted a remarkable amount of attention worldwide, including reviews by Alex Ross in The New Yorker, James Penrose in The Wall Street Journal, and articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the China Times. Colin Lawson, Director of the Royal College of Music, described it as “a tour-de-force: a milestone in the history of musical performance”. In the year of its publication, After the Golden Age was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in the US, and a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year in the UK. In 2009 it was the recipient of an ARSC Certificate of Merit for Research into Recorded Music. An Italian edition, entitled Il trionfo del pianoforte: il pianismo romantico e la sua interpretazione, was published in 2012 by EDT, Turin.

Professor Hamilton is also the author of Liszt: Sonata in B-minor (Cambridge University Press) and contributing editor of The Cambridge Companion to Liszt. His work has featured in The Nineteenth-Century Symphony (Schirmer), Mendelssohn in Performance (Indiana University Press), Wagner and his World (Princeton University Press), The Cambridge Companion to the Piano (CUP), and Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata: Perspectives on Analysis and Performance (Leuven University Press).

An essay for the Liszt bicentenary, “The Sufferings and Greatness of Franz Liszt” (a modest mirror of Thomas Mann’s “Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners”) appeared this year in Franz Liszt: A Chorus of Voices (Pendragon Press). In press are a chapter on misguided nationalism in Liszt reception history, “The Embarrassment of Influence: Liszt, Paris and Posterity”, for Liszt et la France (Editions Vrin); and another on completely fascinating, yet hitherto ignored variants to some of Liszt’s oft-played piano pieces, “Nach persönlichen Erinnerungen: Liszt’s Overlooked Legacy to his Students” for Liszt’s Legacies (Pendragon Press). Works in progress include The Piano, a general history of the instrument and its performance-practice for Yale University Press; The Piano in Prose: Source Readings in the History of the Piano (co-authored with Monika Hennemann, and awarded an AMS publication subvention) for Oxford University Press; and a monograph on the music of Liszt, also for OUP.

Professor Hamilton has given keynote addresses at numerous international conferences, and spoken frequently at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society (AMS) of which he is an elected member of the Performance Committee. He has been Guest Professor at the University of Connecticut, and presented many lectures and masterclasses at the invitation of universities and conservatories worldwide, including the New England Conservatory, Berkeley, Stanford, and Brown Universities in the US; the University of Leuven, Belgium; the University of Minho, Portugal; Musikeon, Valencia, Spain; Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, the Schola Cantorum, Basel; and the St Petersburg Conservatory in Russia.

He himself is a graduate of the University of Glasgow and of Balliol College, Oxford-- and deeply indebted to both Hugh Macdonald and John Warrack for their inspiring tuition in these respective institutions. His doctoral dissertation at Balliol was a critical study of the opera fantasias and transcriptions of Franz Liszt. At the then Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now sensibly sporting a much shorter title) his indefatigable piano teachers were Alexa Maxwell and Lawrence Glover. He later benefitted from the pianistic mentoring of Ronald Stevenson, much of whose music he has had the pleasure of performing.

Subsequently, he was De Velling Willis Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and a member of the Music Department of the University of Birmingham. At Birmingham he rose to the heady heights of Reader in Music, and Head of Research for the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music; while in collaboration with the University’s International Office he devoted much time to forging links with institutions in Singapore, Korea, the US and Germany. He enjoyed giving many series of popular lecture-recitals on composers ranging from Mozart and Beethoven to Elgar and Grainger at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, some of which he also took “on tour” to the Kings Place Festival in London, to the Bard Festivals in the US, and to several venues in South East Asia. In 2012 he joined Cardiff University as Professor of Music.

Professor Hamilton’s undergraduate teaching has included courses on Classical and Romantic Performance-Practice, the operas of Richard Wagner, Giacomo Meyerbeer and French Grand Opera, Programme Music, Film Music, Music at the Fin-de-Siēcle, Richard Strauss, Franz Liszt, Frederic Chopin, Nationalism in Music, Analysis, Counterpoint and Harmony, and the usual Music History Surveys.

He has supervised many postgraduate dissertations, including highly stimulating work on the Violin Students of Leopold Auer, Instructive Editions of J.S.Bach, Liszt as Kapellmeister in Weimar, the Pianism of Paderewski, the Music of Charles Valentin Alkan, Performance Practices in Chopin, Chabrier and Wagner, 20th-century British Organ Performance-Practice, and 18th Century English Parochial Organists. For prospective postgraduate students, he is happily “open for business”.

Publications

Books

After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)A CHOICE ‘Outstanding Academic Title’ (2008), a Daily Telegraph ‘Book of the Year, 2008’, and the recipient in the US of an ARSC Certificate of Merit for Research into Recorded Music, 2009. Italian translation as Il trionfo del pianoforte: il pianismo romantico e la suainterpretazione (Turin: EDT, 2012)

‘Mendelssohn and the Piano’, in Siegwart Reichwald (ed.), Mendelssohn in Performance (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 2008), 19–40Shortlisted for the American Musicological Society Ruth A Solie award for best multi-authored book.

Book Reviews

Review of Carl Czerny: Beyond the Art of Finger Dexterity, ed. by David Gramit and Johann Nepomuk Hummel: A Musician’s Life and World, by Mark Kroll, Journal of Musicological Research, 28/1 (2009), 340–6Review of New Liszt Edition, Supplements to Works for Piano Solo, Vol.5, Studia Musicologica, 49/3–4 (2008), 471–3

Performances in the UK with Colin Lawson clarinet:
Belfast, Cambridge, Durham, Glasgow, Norwich, Nottingham, Sheffield, including three evening recitals on the University of Birmingham’s 1851 Erard piano, with a period clarinet.

24 June 2013: Piano Recital for 9th Biennial Conference on Music in 19th Century Britain Conference (Mendelssohn/Ireland/Elgar/Grainger/Rachmaninoff/Novello-Stevenson/Tauber-Stevenson), Cardiff University Concert Hall

27 November 2012 Piano Lecture-Recital, Bramall Music Building Festival, University of Birmingham: "John Ireland: A Semi-Centenary Tribute"/ Programme to include the Ireland Piano Sonata.

‘Romantic Piano performance practice’ (The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama)

External Examining and Consultancies

Goldsmith’s College, University of London; Royal College of Music; Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama; Birmingham Conservatoire; Royal Academy of Music; Queen’s University, Belfast, Oxford University; the University of South Carolina, College Conservatory of Music, Cincinnati, US, Converse College, US, University of Malta, Malta.Presently external examiner for the music department of the University of Southampton.

Assessor for the Leverhulme Trust; Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, Social Sciences and Research Council, Canada, Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichenForschung (Austria), Oxford University Press; Yale University Press; Cambridge University Press; Routledge Press, Boydell and Brewer, University of Rochester Press, Ashgate Press, Indiana University Press, Music and Letters, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Danish Yearbook of Musicology, Journal of the American Musicological Society. American Musicological Society, Performance Committee (from 2013, Chair in 2014)